The first was when I was probably three years old, maybe four. The playground near our house was right next to a railroad track and the tradition was that when a train went by you couldn't be caught with your feet on the ground or you'd be 'it' or have cooties or somesuch thing. I'd just gotten off of something, teeter-totter maybe, when we heard a train coming. I looked around wildly but there were kids on everything, no room for me. Then suddenly I swear I saw an empty swing and ran to get on it before the train came. Only problem was, I must have hallucinated it because it wasn't empty at all and I ran smack into some kid's shoe. Ripped my left earlobe almost completely off. My sisters, ten and seven years old had to take me home to my mom to go get it stitched back on.

The second was when I was fifteen. I was just running around my back yard (being chased by a 15 year old boy, actually) when I tripped over a gardening stake and broke the neck of my right femur. My mom called a local quack Dr. and he jumped over me as I was stretched out on the sidewalk and *kicked* me, right where it was broken. That's the one and only time I ever really saw stars from pain. Turned out that I needed a bone graft and a pin put in (two weeks in traction, six months on crutches) and later removed. What really upset me, though, was that as soon as I was checked into my hospital room and traction set up, the mother of the kid who'd been horsing around with me called to ask if we were going to sue. I'd had a really bad day and was far less polite than my parents had brought me up to be.